During an executive briefing in Nashville last week, I was asked to provide examples of mash-ups.  My initial reaction was to point to the obvious ones like the ‘store locator’ function in just about every retailers web site.  Then, I showed some neat examples that Garmin has done in their MotionBased site mashing together GPS data from workouts, weather info, and an animated map showing you where you ran or biked during a workout.

It became apparent that the person asking the question wanted examples of ‘unintended consequences’, which led me to point them to the congressional travel analysis on opensecrets.org – click on any of the congressmen’s names in the table.  As I was doing this I remembered an even better example, which is this Diet Coke and Mentos video.  In both of these cases, the original creators of the discrete pieces probably never thought about what would happen if they were combined.

We all need to start thinking this through as we make various services available either internally or externally.  Attend Anthony Bradley’s session on Enterprise Mash-ups to get a better feel for this and attend his Analyst/User Roundtable - Lessons Learned in Enterprise Mash-ups to participate in a discussion on this phenomenon.  Also, check out Anthony’s MacGyver blog post on this.